Yellow Fever Outbreak In Brazil

200 have already died

Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health along with his colleague Dr. Catherine Paules wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine, called Yellow Fever — Once Again on the Radar Screen in the Americas. Its purpose is to encourage the medical community to be aware of a recent outbreak of Yellow Fever in rural Brazil and to pay attention to patients that come in with symptoms. Their hope is that if they can encourage doctors to be proactive that any spread of the disease can be quickly confined and addressed by the use of a vaccination.

Yellow Fever is another mosquito-borne virus and has been around since the 17th century in Africa where it originated. The recent outbreak is in rural Brazil, where there are 1000 suspected cases. Already 200 people have died.

While there is a vaccination, once you contract the disease the treatment only addresses the symptoms of “fever, nausea and muscles aches.” Should it move onto a “toxic” phase where the patient starts to bleed internally, the liver becomes damaged and other organs shut down the patient dies.

Currently, the outbreak is limited to rural Brazil but it could spread to major cities such as Rio and San Paulo through the same mosquito that carries the Zika virus, the Aedes aegypti.